In other words, they post about the money they made, but they conveniently “forget” to report the money they spend. It allows them to look like massive and overnight successes even if they are not breaking even yet.

I decided to be completely open with my readers, and to not hide any expense that I make to grow my online business.

I know that this will not make me look as glamorous and successful as some other people out there, but I don’t care. I want to show you what it TRULY takes to have an online business.

With that out of the way, let’s dive right into the report.

What happened last month?

It’s now been a month since I moved back to Manila and I am fully settled: I moved back into the same condo as last year, and started working from a cowork space again.

I had been working from home for almost 7 years, and even though I enjoyed it, it’s only when I started working from a cowork space a few months ago that I realized how much my productivity had decreased.

I was still putting in crazy hours, but it was taking me longer and longer to get things done.

Working from a cowork space allows me to still work on my own hours and organize my work as I want, and it adds the social aspect of office work that I was clearly lacking.

It’s been particularly nice because I am working in the same office as 2 other affiliate marketers. Bouncing ideas back and forth between marketers is making a huge difference with all the projects I’m currently working on.

Let’s take a look at these projects in more details.

Niche Sites

January had already been my best month ever in terms of traffic to my niche sites. February turned out even better with a massive jump from 10875 to 17372 visitors. That’s a healthy 60% increase.

In terms of revenue, January had been almost identical to December (only $3 decrease).

Since the first week of January was particularly slow (this is the case most years since people spend so much money during the holiday season), I had high hopes for February.

Let’s just say that my sites did not disapoint! February saw an increase of about $100 in revenue from my niche sites.

The following graph shows my product-oriented niche site into more details.

This site was launched almost exactly 1 year ago, so it’s a good time to take a look back at what happened.

It first started as 23 separate sites that I regrouped under a single domain name in September-October 2015, when I realized I was spreading myself too thin by trying to manage all these niche sites independently.

For several month I was losing momentum with that site as I was not seeing the growth I was hoping for, but the merging of all sites together gave me a second push and I kept working on this project.

From that moment, the growth has been quite steady and the numbers are starting to get interesting.

In January the traffic kept increasing but revenue didn’t follow… Then February came: 22% traffic growth, and 91% revenue growth!

I’m not putting as much work into this project as I used to, and I am currently waiting for the site to mature and get better rankings in search engines.

We’ll see if the site keeps growing in March…

Joint Venture

Apart from a little debugging here and there, I almost didn’t work at all on this project.

I spent the previous 2 months building the basic functionality for this site and I didn’t take a single day off, so I decided to take a step back and relax while my business partner work on his side of the project.

We’re currently trying to figure out the best possible monetization before we start to push a significant amount of paid traffic to the site.

For this project, we have a global strategy that includes both paid traffic and organic traffic.

Since we’re working in one of the most competitive and lucrative niches online, search engines are being particularly cautious with the sites they rank.

As a result, we’re still in the sandbox and we’re not getting any organic traffic yet.

Our only option at this point is to optimize our funnel and monetization strategy by working with small amounts of paid traffic.

We’re currently losing money on this project, but we both know that it’s not wasted money: we’re paying a lot of attention to all the data we collect and gradually improve our site.

Dukeo

Once again, there is not much to report about this blog: I didn’t post any article last month, besides the monthly income report.

Traffic has been steady and profit increase by $17.00 (Yay!).

Don’t expect more articles in the near future as I am focusing my effort on other projects where I see more potential for revenue.

But who knows, I might decide all of a sudden to revive this blog and start posting more detailed guides about the strategies I am working on.

Viral Sites

It’s been 2.5 months since I stopped pushing paid traffic to my viral sites and the revenue crashed.

I am keeping them alive at this point only because they are not costing me any money and I need some time to figure out what to do with them: revive them, sell them, kill them, or whatever else goes through my mind.

What about the money?

Here is a breakdown of the money flow for my various projects.

To make this report easier to understand, I’m using a simple color code: green numbers are positive, red numbers are negative.

Please keep in mind that these figures may not be 100% accurate due to various factors such as refund requests and network adjustments. The terms for each payment may also vary. As a result these numbers may differ from the actual payments issued and received.

Other

Net: -$457.10(Difference: +$77.44)

The most significant event in February is the profit from my niche sites: that’s the first time these sites are returning a profit since March last year.

It’s only pocket money at this point, but the trend is encouraging nonetheless. We’ll have to see if it keeps growing in March.

The profit will most likely not increase much since I put back every dollar in revenue into the project to try to grow as efficiently as possible, but the revenue will.

At this point, the only project that is pulling my numbers down is the joint venture. Everything else is bringing profit (as little as it may be).

What’s next?

In March, the plan is to work on my product niche site and start to accelerate the traffic (and revenue) growth, and hopefully hit $1000 in revenue from that site alone.

We’re also going to do more SEO work on the Joint Venture and stop the paid traffic for a few weeks as we are not seeing much improvement at the moment.

I’m seeing much better results when I focus my attention on a smaller number of projects for an entire month, so this is exactly what I’m going to do in March!

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6 Comments

Dear Steven,I would also love hearing more about your niche sites — it’s a subject that has so often been “mystified” by others all over the net, and I’d love to see how they’re doing and what you focus on there. Would be great if you copied me on that info.

Following your posts since the “early Dukeo” times (before you even moved away) with huge interest.